The Sound of Your Voice
by KitKatt0430
Summary: Hartley's always had a thing for voices, getting crushes on voice actors and playing his favorite video games just to hear their voices. And then the accelerator accident changes how Hartley perceives sound and he comes to the conclusion that his days of voices crushes are basically over. Until, in the midst of a migraine, Hartley finds Cisco's voice to be unusually soothing...


Summary: Hartley's always had a thing for voices, getting crushes on voice actors and playing his favorite video games just to hear their voices. And then the accelerator accident changes how Hartley perceives sound and he comes to the conclusion that his days of voices crushes are basically over.

Until, in the midst of a migraine, Hartley finds Cisco's voice to be unusually soothing...

Notes: Another story for the Hartmon Long Weekend, though no specific prompts used this time.

_**The Sound of Your Voice**_

Hartley's always had a thing for voices.

In high school, trapped in a Catholic school that constantly reinforced the idea that being gay was sinful and wrong and that just thinking gay thoughts made you a horrible, sinful person, Hartley turned to video games for an escape. The one that helped the most was a niche game, a JRPG, on the Gamecube called Tales of Symphonia. Hartley must've played the game a half-dozen times during high school alone, feeling ridiculously grateful for the character of Zelos Wilder who was pretty clearly closeted queer character, maybe gay or bi or pan. But… it was the character Kratos Aurion that made Hartley realize he got what he could only classify as 'voice crushes'.

Kratos Aurion was voiced by some guy named Cam Clarke and Hartley was pretty sure he could listen to the guy talk all day long. If he recorded books on tape of him reading the dictionary or the phone book, Hartley still would have bought them and listened religiously, all because the man's voice was simply… beautiful.

Then Hartley found Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and found another voice to crush on, as the character of Bao-Dur sounded just… amazing. There was no telling how many times Hartley had replayed that game over the years, just for the sake of listening to Bao-Dur talk.

It all changed when the Accelerator Explosion (capitalization totally deserved) altered Hartley's auditory senses, making sound into the enemy.

Even when he could tolerate sound with his hearing aids in, Hartley had been too obsessed with taking revenge on Wells to do anything that might make his life feel normal again. So it wasn't until Eobard Thawne was dead (and Eddie too, which was a shame; he'd been kind to Hartley when he didn't have to be and actually meant it too) that Hartley sat down at a computer, fired up his long neglected Steam account, and downloaded KotOR 2, modding the hell out of it with full screen hacks and HD reskins and the restoration mods for all the cut content and a mod so that he could romance Atton as a guy PC while still keeping the character Handmaiden instead of getting Disciple, because why not? (Disciple was freakishly annoying and if Atton and Handmaiden occasionally used the wrong pronouns, it wasn't going to bother Hartley overly much.)

That was when Hartley began to realize just what the difference in his hearing meant when it came to his average, everyday life. Because there was a quality to the recorded voices that Hartley had never been able to hear before. It was subtle, but all too obvious what separated a real, live voice from a recorded one and when Bao-Dur showed up to be recruited onto the team, Hartley had to stop playing.

Because it was different. The shine was gone. His voice crush was just… not there.

Gee, thanks Wells. Asshole.

So Hartley resigned himself to the idea that his audiophile-ish side was basically ruined. Though he did eventually finish his KotOR 2 replay, it was never quite the same. Neither was Tales of Symphonia when he got ahold of the re-release on his PS3.

* * *

Hartley was no stranger to migraines even before his hearing got jacked up, but they were definitely more common now than they used to be. To the point where Hartley had forgotten he'd run out of the Tylenol he usually kept in his desk and now had to choose between getting aspirin from the infirmary – which meant potentially encountering Caitlin – or hitting up the first aid 'station' (a large metal box on the wall by the break room) which was in full view of the door to Cisco's lab… either way, he was potentially going to be hit with twenty questions. Deciding that Cisco's theoretical concern was both less likely and less intrusive than Caitlin's, Hartley found himself standing outside the break room, rooting around for a packet of generic aspirin.

Once he had the packet, he went into the break room itself to fetch a water bottle from the fridge because even though Hartley could dry-swallow medicine if he had to, it was his least favorite method as it left a sort of… tacky feeling in the back of his throat, almost like the pills got stuck there and not even guzzling water afterwards made the feeling go away which meant it took forever to fade. Besides, headaches always made Hartley feel a little dehydrated – or possibly it was being slightly dehydrated that contributed to his headaches – and the water would do him good.

Water bottle in hand, Hartley broke open the aspirin packet and downed the two pills, along with about half the water. Then he winced, because his eyes were definitely starting to get sensitive to light and he'd looked up, briefly, at the can lights in the ceiling.

Time to retreat to the server room and the inviting darkness it promised, alongside the relative quiet the server generated white noise offered.

He'd first made the server room his 'headache haven' when he was still working for Wells, only a few weeks after he'd been first hired. A migraine drove him in there and he'd come out, hours later, still feeling tetchy and achy, but the worst of his pain lessened into a dull, normal headache. He'd almost run directly into Wells on the way back to his lab and been subjected to a worried gaze. Wells had affected a concerned air (it couldn't have been real, since Wells never cared; he'd never been anything but disposable to that man and even now that stung more than anything) and dragged the story behind Hartley's recurring migraines out of him. Afterwards, though, Hartley had felt better for confiding in someone.

That was when he'd started to see STAR Labs as home… and Wells as something like a parent.

Hartley slipped quietly into the server room – the hinges squeaked, probably too quiet for anyone else to hear, and Hartley made a mental note to fix that later – and settled onto the floor beside the nearest server rack. He placed the water bottle to his right and then pulled up his legs so that he could wrap his arms around his shins and rest his head on his knees.

The sounds from the outside world dropped down considerably, but the white noise still couldn't mask the tell-tale sound of Cisco's distinctive footsteps coming down the hall or the soft squeak from the door again when the engineer peered inside.

"Hartley?"

Oddly enough, the sound of Cisco's voice did not exacerbate the pounding in Hartley's head like everything else seemed to. So he looked up, just enough to see over his knees and catch the worried expression on Cisco's face.

"Would you close the door behind you," Hartley asked, rubbing at his temples and hiding his eyes again. The corridor, which had been bearable just minutes earlier, was now far too bright.

Cisco slipped the rest of the way into the room and shut the door. "Are you okay?" He sounded quiet and hesitant, but once again his voice failed to make Hartley feel worse.

"I've got a migraine," Hartley replied. "Hoping the aspirin will kick in before it gets any worse." Which it clearly wasn't.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Cisco paused and then added. "I mean, besides go, since… I'm probably just making it worse. With the talking and… yeah, I'll just shut up now."

Hartley looked up, feeling a little amused beneath the steady beat of hurts, hurts, hurts. Somehow, the tension in his shoulders had eased while Cisco babbled. "Actually, could you stay?" the words slipped out without Hartley's permission, but it was kind of worth it to see Cisco do a momentary gold-fish impression in shocked surprise. "Your voice is sort of… helping."

The engineer made a sort of squeaky noise in surprise.

"Well, not when you sound like a mouse," Hartley amended, half-smiling for a few moments while Cisco gave him a briefly offended look.

Then Cisco moved on to nervous. "My voice helps?"

"For whatever reason, yeah. Your voice is soothing." Hartley paused and then added, "there aren't a lot of sounds that don't make my migraines worse. So stay and talk to me about… whatever. I don't care. Your favorite Tales game. Just..." he trailed off, the words 'please don't go' sticking in his throat. Because Cisco was probably taking this entirely the wrong way and thought he was pulling a really bizarre prank or something and would storm off, upset, any second now.

Cisco walked over and, gingerly, settled beside Hartley, back against the server rack. "How do you even know I play Tales games?"

"JRPGs with anime cut-scenes, bizarre plots, and well developed characters? Seemed more unlikely that you wouldn't play them," Hartley replied numbly, a maybe a little shocked because… he was being taken seriously?

But Cisco just laughed softly. "Fair point," he agreed quietly. "But, oh, picking a favorite? So very hard. I mean, there's the first one I played, which was Tales of the Abyss, and I really love that one. It's got some major nostalgia points in its favor. But… Luke annoyed me for the first half of the game, or whenever his plot-important haircut finally fixed his personality, and if it weren't for how awesome Guy and Jade were, I might've just quit out of irritation over Luke's constant whining before reaching that point."

Hartley could literally feel himself unwinding as Cisco's calm voice washed over him. Tentatively, he unhooked his arms from around his shins and leaned back again, eyes shut and head tilted against the server rack such that the soft humming seemed to reverberate slightly through his skull. Still, Cisco kept talking.

"I never did play Legendia, though I hear it was kinda bad?"

"It wasn't horrible, but for a Tales game it sucked," Hartley muttered. "Its probably the only game in the series where I absolutely loathe the canon couple."

"So not missing anything there, then," Cisco allowed. "I really liked Tales of Graces. Though I'm one of those weird people who actually likes playing the child-arc prologue section. Tiny Asbel trying to be tough is hilariously adorable and so many problems would've been solved if his dad had actually taken a long, hard look at why his parenting style was failing so abysmally. But, nope, apparently that man was much better with flowers than people." Cisco chattered on, eventually switching over to talking about the two Xillia games and how the first one was really good but the second one he was kind of iffy about. "Because they're destroying entire alternate realities and are somehow okay with this because theirs lives? Yeah, that's just… no. I… well, I keep trying to write a fix-fic for it, but I really suck at writing dialog. So I've got an awesomely detailed plot line and nothing post-able to show for it. I have, like, half a dozen drafts saved on my computer at home that I should probably just delete."

Hartley hummed softly, listing slightly towards Cisco before pulling himself up straight again. He was just so tired… "Played any Symphonia?" he asked, words slurring slightly. "It was my first Tales game."

"Yeah, I got the re-release on launch day," Cisco said. "The graphics look kinda dated now, even with the HD face-lift, but I kept thinking that it must've looked pretty awesome on the Gamecube..."

This time, when Hartley listed off to the side, he couldn't bring himself to sit back up again; instead his shoulder pressed up against Cisco's arm and his head landed on the other man's shoulder. There was silence as Cisco trailed off mid sentence.

"Hartley? Are you… still awake?"

After a sluggish mental debate, Hartley decided that the answer was no and stayed silent. Cisco was comfortable, made for an excellent pillow, and Hartley could hear the steady sound of Cisco's heart really clearly like this. Cisco's heartbeat – and his breathing, for that matter – were every bit as soothing as Cisco's voice. Honestly, Hartley probably should have expected that at this point.

It might've been Hartley's imagination as he finally slipped into actual sleep, but he thought he felt Cisco petting his hair.

* * *

Hartley wakes up to the low murmur of Cisco's voice, presumably talking on his phone, and somewhere in that sleepiness, he has an epiphany.

He's got a new voice crush. On Cisco.


End file.
